DATA PROJECT

Angelica Gamboa and Gwendolyn Espinoza

2025-03-28

INTRODUCTION

The data was gathered from:
- National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) – Leading Causes of Death in the U.S.
The NCHS dataset includes:
- Mortality statistics across various U.S. states over multiple years
- Excludes murder from the listed causes of death

What are the leading causes of death since 2001?
Which state had the most amount of deaths in the US?
What was the leading cause of death in California?
How has the cause of heart disease deaths changed over time?
How has the cause of cancer deaths changed over time?
We know the adjusted death rate for the data, but what does the rate look like when we subtract “all causes’?
What is the death rate by cause and state?
What is the age-adjusted death rate for heart disease?

Year: Year in which the incident took place.
X113 cause name: The full, official name of the cause of death classified by the NCHS.
Cause name: A broader label for the cause of death.
State: The U.S. state where the data was collected.
Deaths: The total number of deaths reported for a specific cause of death.
Age-adjusted death rate: The death rate per 100,000 people, adjusted per age group for fair comparison.

CLRD stands for Chronic Lower Respiratory Diseases.

State	Year	Total Deaths	Known Cause Deaths	Unclassified Deaths
Alabama	2017	53,238	39,366	13,872
Alaska	2017	4,411	3,118	1,293
Arizona	2017	57,758	42,928	14,830
Arkansas	2017	32,588	25,233	7,355
California	2017	268,189	206,761	61,428
Colorado	2017	38,063	27,626	10,437
Connecticut	2017	31,312	22,103	9,209
Delaware	2017	9,178	6,902	2,276
District of Columbia	2017	4,965	3,581	1,384
Florida	2017	203,636	152,459	51,177

Different states or regions have different age structures.
Older populations naturally have higher death rates so comparing raw death rates across states would be misleading.
To make fair comparisons across the states, public health stats use age adjustment instead of uing raw numbers.